Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 27: The Narrows

The column moved out before the camp’s cook fires had caught for the morning meal.

Batu was mounted at the eastern gate when the lead elements came through. The steppe opened ahead in long pale rolls, the sky still dark at its northern edge, the cold showing in the horses’ breath.

He held his position at the gate until the middle of the column had passed, reading the force as it took shape on the route ahead.

One full tumen, the eastern component of the three, their horses fresh from the tighter orbit of the past days. Behind them, Chaidu’s element, sixty-one riders since the forty had gone with Jaran to the Hasal crossing, moving as a distinct group before the forward riders took their positions.

Further along, visible as a coherent sub-unit inside the main body, Kirsa’s riders. A hundred and fifty-seven of them, the three who held by conviction left behind on the western screen.

The Khotor name was gone. What those men knew had come with them.

The western tumen’s holding garrison was still visible from the gate, spread across the southern and western patrol lines. The northern screen had been pulled to pairs, two riders on each outer observation point with orders to report and hold.

Nothing would move on those approaches without reaching him. Nothing he’d left behind had enough mass to invite testing.

What he had with him was the piece that mattered.

Khulgen had found him at the gate before they moved out. The Arslan channel was still silent. No word had come back east through Borte-Qol’s line since the purge.

Guyuk was reading the same absence Siban was reading, from a greater distance.

A rider from the Ulus headman had arrived before dawn. The headman was aware of the situation on the northeastern approach and would not be sending riders in any direction. He had framed it as a matter of supply and distance.

He turned his horse and rode to the front of the column.

Torghul was already there. He looked at Batu without speaking. The steppe ahead was empty and gray and wide.

"The screen," Batu said.

"Lead pairs went out an hour ago," Torghul said. "Middle screen is at spacing now. Rear observation went out at the gate." He kept his eyes on the horizon. "Penk’s relay points are set at two-hour intervals. Reports come back through riders.

The terrain won’t carry mirrors cleanly past the second fold."

Batu nodded once. Penk had assessed the country from Jaran and Kirsa’s map and adjusted the relay method before they moved out.

The map had been built for this country. It recorded what the crossings had seen and what the folds did to signals between them.

The first report came back through the relay before the first hour had finished. The lead pairs had cleared the second fold with nothing ahead.

The report moved from the lead pair to the middle relay and from there back to the main body in the time the protocol specified.

No gap. No blind flank. The relay rider turned and went back to his position without waiting to be dismissed, which was itself something that had not been there at the beginning.

They settled into the long steppe pace through the late morning. The ground was flat enough to let the screen spread wide, giving any observation post within two hours’ ride a clear view of the flanks.

Guyuk’s network had mapped this territory before Batu arrived, had catalogued the crossing families and the ridge approaches and the seasonal track conditions.

The network was dark now. The force moving through the ground it had mapped was his.

The terrain began to change after midday.

The flat rolls grew longer and the stretches between them narrowed and channeled. The track followed the valley between two ridge systems running roughly parallel from northeast to southwest, and as they moved deeper into the channel the ridgelines rose on both sides until they ran continuous on both flanks.

The flanks, which had spread freely on the flat steppe, compressed toward the road.

Kirsa’s sub-unit was riding ahead of Batu’s position in the formation, at the point where the track narrowed before the next fold.

He watched them from behind without directing them.

At the mouth of one of the narrower stretches, where the passage cut close to the western ridgeline before opening again, the Kirsa riders slowed without a signal from Torghul or anyone in the command element.

Their outer pair moved to the elevation above the cut, checked the sight lines from both directions, and came back down. The riders moved through without stopping.

Jaran and Kirsa’s work had noted that point as a blind approach on the eastern side. The Kirsa riders had known it before the record confirmed it.

They had run that ground from the other side for two generations.

Torghul rode back to Batu at the next flat section. "They’ve been doing that since the terrain changed."

"I know," Batu said.

Torghul rode forward again.

The second relay report came back clean. The third, sent as the ridgelines on both sides had risen to their full height, noted fresh animal sign on the heights to the northeast.

A grazing herd. It had moved through within the past day.

Herds moved ahead of pressure. Siban’s force pushing through that country in strength would have driven it south. The herd had gone northeast.

The lead pairs’ read was that the herd had been grazing normally until something on the northern edge of its range had nudged it sideways.

Something on the northern edge. A sound or a change in the steppe’s ordinary rhythm that a grazing herd read before men in the saddle could.

Batu passed the report to Torghul and said nothing else.

The narrows arrived in the late afternoon.

The ridgelines converged ahead to a point where the passage ran through a channel perhaps two hundred meters wide at its narrowest before the steppe opened again beyond.

The channel ran for perhaps four hundred meters. The ridgelines on both sides provided elevation over the cut for the full length of the passage.

Their record had described this. The terrain confirmed it exactly.

Torghul was already reading it when the force halted. He sent elements to the ridgelines without being asked, four groups moving to the heights on both sides, reaching their positions and signaling back before the main body had fully settled.

The rear observation pulled tight to cover the southern approach. Chaidu’s element took the slope below the western ridgeline where the ground offered cover for a mounted group.

Batu rode to the base of the eastern ridgeline and dismounted. He went up on foot to where the lead element had positioned itself and stood on the high ground above the channel.

The track ran north from the narrows and out onto the flat steppe beyond. In the fading afternoon light it was visible for a long distance before it bent around a low feature and disappeared.

The steppe beyond it was empty.

The lead scout was already there. He turned when Batu reached him.

"The road," Batu said.

"There." The scout pointed north, to the section where the route crossed a low ford before the curve. "I went forward on foot when we stopped. The ford’s been crossed recently. The bank on the southern side is cut up."

A pause. "More than one horse. Moving south."

"How recently."

"Within a day. Maybe less."

Something had come through moving south. The herd sign to the northeast had shown pressure from the north.

Two pieces of ground, read separately, pointing in the same direction.